The GOP health-care reform bill that will be released Thursday by Senate leaders would repeal Obamacare taxes, structure subsidies to insurance customers based on their incomes, and phase out Medicaid’s expansion program, CNBC has learned.
The bill also would continue to offer payments to health insurance companies that reimburse them for subsidies that reduce out-of-pocket costs for low income customers of Obamacare plans.
Sources told CNBC that the federal government’s share of funding for Medicaid, which is jointly run with individual states, would fall over the course of seven years to end up at around 57 percent of the cost of that program, which offers health coverage to the poor.
Under Obamacare, the federal government had guaranteed that its funding for adults newly eligible for Medicaid because of the Affordable Care Act would fall to no lower than 90 percent of their costs.
The Trump administration is expected to back the bill, which most GOP senators were learning the details of during a meeting Thursday morning.
The official draft of the bill is expected to be released online at 11 a.m. Thursday.
Senate GOP leaders want to have a vote on the bill by late next week, before Congress’ July 4 recess.
Leslie Dach, director of the Obamare-supporting group Protect Our Care Campaign blasted the bill.
“Senate Republicans promised to start over and write a plan that improves people’s health care,” Dach said. “Instead they doubled down on the failed House repeal approach that puts everyone’s health care last, and tax breaks for the wealthy first.”
“The heartless Senate health care repeal bill makes health care worse for everyone — it raises costs, cuts coverage, weakens protections an dcuts even more from Medicaid than the mean House bill,” said Dach, who had served as senior counselor at the Department of Health and Human Services in the Obama administration.
“They wrote their plan in secret and are rushing forward with a vote next week because they know how much harm their bill does to millions of people.”
The Congressional Budget Office is expected to release, by Monday at the soonest, an analysis of the Senate’s bill. That analysis will estimate how many people are likely to become uninsured in the next decade if the bill becomes law, as well as how premiums for individual health plans would be affected.
The CBO “score” would also include projections on the bill’s impact on federal spending.
The release of the draft of the Senate bill comes more than a month-and-a-half after GOP leaders in the House barely managed to win passage for their own health-care legislation.
That House bill, the American Health Care Act, is widely unpopular among the public, multiple polls have shown.
The non-partisan CBO, in analyzing that bill, found that 23 million more Americans would become uninsured by 2026 if it became law than if Obamacare remained in place.
While many of those people would voluntarily cease buying insurance plans because of the elimination requirement that they have some form of health coverage or pay a fine, millions more would find their plans unaffordable because of either rising prices, the loss of government subsidies, or both factors.
This a breaking news story. Please check back for updates.